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Believing What Scares You

Psychologists are familiar with motivated inference, in which people acquire beliefs with shaky evidence because the beliefs make them happy. For example, you naturally want to believe that you are attractive, successful, and healthy, so you look for reasons to support these beliefs. Much less well known is fear-driven inference, in which people acquire beliefs with little evidence because the beliefs scare them.

Although it seems weird that fear could lead to beliefs, consider the following examples in domains that are important to people.

Economics: The economy is doomed to perpetual recession and depression.

What are the mental mechanisms that can lead people to believe what they fear because they fear it?

David Nussbaum and I just published a chapter about fear-driven inference that offers a cognitive-emotional explanation of how it comes about. We propose that the mechanism underlying fear-driven inference is gut overreaction, which involves an ongoing feedback loop between judgment and emotional response. Consider the example of Othello in Shakespeare’s play, who becomes convinced that his wife Desdemona is having an affair with minimal basis for the belief. Iago’s misinformation leads Othello to suspect that Desdemona is cheating, but this makes him feel bad, which in turn makes him even more suspicious of her. The fact that she might be unfaithful causes him to feel bad about her, which loops to make him more suspicious of her. The general case is that thinking that things are bad (with children or anything else that matters) causes you to feel bad, which in turn leads you to become more convinced that things are bad. In fear-driven inference, the amplifying feedback loop between inference and emotional reaction leads to negative emotions such as anxiety and anger. A gut overreaction produces excessively negative emotions that compel people to focus on negative possibilities and thereby become more prone to believe them.

How can people avoid fear-driven inference and its flip side, motivated inference, which can also be bred by gut overreactions? Completely separating cognition from emotion is no solution, because our brains integrate the two, with emotion areas such as the amygdala thoroughly connected with cognitive areas such as the prefrontal cortex. Nevertheless, it can help to avoid fear-driven and motivated inference to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is the full range of evidence for the belief that is making you scared or happy?

2. What are the alternative explanations for this evidence?

3. What do other people who do not have your fears and motivations think about the plausibility of the belief?

Following this procedure might help you avoid the gut overreactions that mislead people because of their hopes and their fears.

I agree that the general case is: Thinking that things are bad (with children or anything else that matters) causes you to feel bad, which in turn leads you to become more convinced that things are bad." I think it is a vicious circle: One belief in wrong belief (things r bad) leading to a bad feeling featuring several possibilities (this thing can harm me, what if it comes to me, and so on)

Fear gives rise to suspicion and suspicion simply increases fear. However, I believe the robust solution to such fears is to avoid believing in them! When you do not believe (ego does not believe obviously), you do not give support to the surfacing fear. As a result, that fear will eventually fall; it will not stay within you!